position, sectarianism prevailed over modernisation. Geoffrey Copcutt, an Englishman responsible for implementing part of the Matthew Report, resigned in protest. He told the British press that the ‘situation of the Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland was very similar to that of the Negro in the United States’.97
O’Neill’s economic plans may have been flawed, but his political plans appeared flawless. The Derry Journal grumbled that the 1965 Stormont general election was ‘thrust on a jaded public, in the dead of winter, eighteen months before it is due, and on what grounds is anyone’s guess’.98 It was called on the grounds that O’Neill wanted to exploit communal divisions within the NILP and it succeeded in repulsing the party’s advance into Unionist territory. The NILP lost half its seats and saw its share of the vote fall by a third. ‘The unfortunate Labour Party’, O’Neill gleefully recalled, ‘was in fact practically annihilated.’99 The Prime Minister had not always been such a committed enemy of the NILP. ‘In an interview given to the New Statesman, in 1958,’ the party’s main strategist remembered, ‘[O’Neill] came as close as any Unionist politician could do to welcoming the advent of Northern Ireland Labour as a constitutional opposition’.100 However, as the New Statesman interviewer acknowledged in a later article, the then Deputy Prime Minister’s endorsement of the NILP had ‘got him into serious trouble with his party’.101 It was widely believed that losing working-class votes to the NILP – whose support for the Union was far from certain – was the beginning of a process that would lead to the end of partition. Similarly, the West German Christian Democrats viewed their Social Democratic opponents as the party that would let in the Communists.102 Historians have tended to regard O’Neill’s subsequent attack on the NILP and its gradualist, parliamentary approach to civil rights reform as a ‘classic misjudgement’.103 O’Neill though had recognised that his survival as Unionist leader depended upon driving the NILP to the edge of political extinction.
THE ARCH TRAITOR
O’Neill’s self-appointed task may have been to ‘transform the face of Ulster’, but he later defined this ambition rather narrowly.104 In an October 1963 television interview, which was reported in the Derry Journal, O’Neill ‘explained that “what he really had in mind” in that statement was simply the promotion of better industrial relations and enterprise with a view to economic recovery’. O’Neill, the newspaper regretfully concluded, ‘implied that his objective as Premier had nothing to do at all with … co-operation … between the two sections of the Six County community’.105 Although he was an interventionist when it came to the economy, the new Prime Minister preferred to entrust the problem of community relations to the free play of forces. Protestants should content themselves with playing good neighbours to Catholics until the ecumenical movement, the welfare state, and all the trends associated with modernisation finally delivered communal harmony. Conceiving of the British link as a source of economic benefits and privileged access to the international community, O’Neill hoped that ‘those who are now in opposition’ would be convinced ‘that their own ultimate best interests’ lay with the Union.106
O’Neill’s reluctance to intervene disappointed liberal Unionists. Jack Sayers, the editor of the influential Belfast Telegraph, marked O’Neill down in this area when he delivered his end-of-year report. ‘[O]n the subject of political evolution, of communal relations,’ Sayers observed in his radio broadcast, ‘the Prime Minister’s statements and those of his ministers have been … muted’. He concluded ‘that the Unionist leadership has done little or nothing to come to terms with [the] feeling for tolerance and … freedom of expression among a great many people on both sides of the politico-religious fence’.107 O’Neill could not ignore this disenchantment: Faulkner had not given up on his leadership ambitions and his plotting was forcing the Prime Minister to seek liberal support.108 Shortly after Sayers’s negative review, O’Neill took what he later described as his ‘first step in the direction of improving community relations’.109 On 24 April 1964, he became the first Northern Ireland Prime Minister to visit a Catholic school. O’Neill listened to the school choir, attended a hurling match, and had his photograph taken with some nuns.110
This focus upon symbolism rather than substantive reform climaxed the following year with the invitation of Seán Lemass, the Southern Prime Minister, to Stormont. Lemass was a veteran of the Easter Rising, but economic modernisation mattered more to him than traditional Irish nationalist concerns. Like O’Neill, he was confident that economic and social change would bring an end to the island’s ancient animosities. Unlike O’Neill, he believed that a modernised Ireland would be a united Ireland.111 The Northern Prime Minister was effectively forced into responding to the overtures from the South: Lemass was planning to speak at Queen’s University, the media were calling for a meeting, liberal Unionist pressure was growing, and Faulkner was apparently considering a similar initiative.112 Nevertheless, when Lemass arrived in Belfast on 14 January 1965, it came as a surprise to politicians as well as to the general public.113 O’Neill’s Cabinet was informed only on the morning of the meeting – just a few hours before the news was released to the press. Standing in ‘the rather spacious loo at Stormont’, the Southern Prime Minister confided to his Northern counterpart that he was going to ‘get into terrible trouble for this’. ‘No, Mr Lemass,’ came the reply, ‘it is I who will get into trouble for this.’114 O’Neill was right.
The blaze of publicity surrounding O’Neill’s bridge-building gestures was soon to be eclipsed by the dark fears that they raised. Lemass’s invitation to Stormont brought an unwelcome guest to the seat of government: Ian Paisley. The Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church, an evangelical Protestant sect that he had helped to found, came to accuse O’Neill of treachery.115 For Paisley, there was no halfway house between truth and error, good and evil, Christ and Antichrist. The Protestant conspiracy theory had undoubtedly found its most eloquent and most inventive spokesman. Paisley invoked an IRA–Vatican plot marked by darkness, secrecy, violence, and sexual perversity. The Protestant Telegraph, Paisley’s weekly newspaper, contained articles with headlines such as ‘Love Affairs of the Vatican’, ‘Jesuit Plots Unmasked’, and ‘Papal Conspiracy’.116
Paisley believed that Christ had sent him forth as a sheep in the midst of these black-robed wolves. As a gifted Bible scholar, he understood that God’s instruments were expected to be as wise as serpents. For the Unionist leadership at least, however, Paisley was not as harmless as a dove. When, in June 1963, Belfast City Hall flew the Union flag at half-mast to mark the death of Pope John XXIII, Paisley explained that he would not tolerate such actions because he ‘remembered … men like [the sixteenth-century Reformers] Calvin, Knox, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer broke rather than bent for the Gospel and liberty’.117 The post-war ecumenical movement was attempting to forge closer links between the world’s Churches. But Paisley and other Protestant fundamentalists, such as the American Baptist preacher Bob Jones Jr., remained at war with Rome.118 Since the 1950s, Paisley had been at the forefront of protests against the Protestant Churches and the Unionist government’s supposed appeasement of Catholics. As religious and political ministers started to build bridges in the 1960s, Paisley stepped up his campaign against those he saw as the ‘Iscariots of Ulster’ crossing over to the other side.119
Although his language echoed seventeenth-century sermons, Paisley’s message still resonated with a twentieth-century audience. During a period of rapid change, he reaffirmed unionism’s traditional values. But Paisleyism was not simply a regressive phenomenon, retarding O’Neill’s efforts to modernise Northern Ireland. Like the New Catholicism of the late nineteenth century, the Protestant preacher criticised liberalism while embracing many contemporary developments.120 He set up a newspaper, founded voluntary associations, organised mass demonstrations, travelled regularly to Continental Europe and North America, and forged links with like- minded foreigners. These were the means that Paisley used to reach those unionists who had benefited from post-war social and economic reforms but nevertheless wanted Northern Ireland to remain a Protestant state. This was a small but growing constituency. Beginning in 1965, the Orange Order and frontier Unionists came together to oppose further concessions being made to Catholics.121 At a rally held that year to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne,
